Barriers of small-scale hydropower in the Netherlands

One of the biggest current challenges for Earth and humanity is climate change. To lower the impact of already existing effects and decrease potential future effects of rising temperatures, countries have decided on actions with the goal of keeping the temperature rise no higher than 1.5°C. One part of those actions is a transition in the energy system from polluting fossil fuels to renewable energy carriers, such as wind, solar, or hydropower.
In the Netherlands, hydropower is clearly lagging behind compared to other European coun- tries, for various reasons. Some pioneering companies are still trying to utilize the potential of hydropower they see in the large water system in the Netherlands. However, they are struggling to progress and deploy their solutions, as happened at the Bosscherveld project in the south of the Netherlands, Maastricht. The companies involved there claimed that stakeholder processes were the main causes for barriers that stalled project advancements.
Within energy transition projects, stakeholder management often causes problems, and the ac- tual factors that make an actor oppose or stall a project are multifaceted and hard to grasp. Additionally, there is a lack of tools and methods for a company working on technologies in this field to gain a thorough understanding of their stakeholders and translate that understanding into concrete strategic decisions on how to behave in such a project. With this research it was attempted to identify the most important stakeholder-related factors for a company to consider when working within an energy transition based project. This should add managerial guidance as well as the ability to assess the status of a project. For a company already working on the project or that joins it, they can estimate the condition the project is in and see what is missing for its success, improving the overall certainty for potential revenues.
With a mixed-framework approach consisting of the definition of the main structural compo- nents and policies of the technology innovation system (TIS) surrounding the SHP, a classic stakeholder analysis using a power-interest-grid, and semi-structured interviews to create an expert model for the small-scale hydropower (SHP) project has been applied. The first two areas were mainly used to get an understanding of the technology’s surrounding market and to make assumptions regarding the roles involved in the project. The interviews were aimed to fully understand the project’s processes and each stakeholder’s perceptions on barriers in those processes, so that an ideal process and the stakeholders’ views on most important factors for such a project could be derived.
With this approach it was possible to identify 25 stakeholder-related factors that are important to consider for a company working on such a project, as well as understanding their interconnec- tions and reasons for why they are important. The factors then could be classified into themes
covering Motivation, Purpose, Effective Teamwork, Investment, Entrepreneurial Activities, Base of Collaboration, and Macro-Environment and clustered into areas that build the Foundation of the Venture the factors that are Supporting Collaboration, and the ones that influ- ence and define the Stakeholder Interest. The first area consists of factors, that need to be present at the beginning of the project or need to be established within the starting phase such as resources, a business model, and trust. The factors to support the collaboration are fostering continuous interaction and general rules for how it should be worked together, such as planning and ownership. The factors of stakeholder interest, achieve a higher resolution of how a stakeholder’s interest is formed, and what should be looked at during the stakeholder analysis, to understand the actors positioning within and towards the project, like a stakeholder’s drive, their personal vision, or simply what they can gain from the project. This must be done on a continuous bases, since a stakeholder’s motivation and gains can change due to unforeseeable events or a change in for instance a country’s policy.
Therefore, it could be seen that not one or a few instances or factors could be identified that resulted in the halt of the project, but a variety of aspects combined hampered its progress.
Furthermore, it has been pointed out that the previously identified factors are only partly ad- dressed by an adapted TIS framework by Ortt and Kamp (2022), which has been applied at the end of the research, due to its claim that it had an improved managerial perspective for companies working in a niche environment, trying to bring their technology to a wide market diffusion.
The possibility of generalizing the conclusions regarding the crucial factors regarding stakeholder participation for a company working on an SHP project in the Netherlands are limited due to the specificity of the project and the limited number of stakeholders and perspectives that could be gathered. Therefore, it is suggested to investigate additional hydropower projects in the Netherlands, compare them with the Bosscherveld case, and see whether the concluded factors can capture the dynamics there as well or if further refinements are necessary.

 

The final report can be downloaded here.